High consumer Push appetite brings opportunity for operators to capitalise on brands’ desire to connect with consumers

29th October 2015, Dublin, Ireland: Openmind Networks today announced a potential $10.9 billion market opportunity for operator-enabled push notifications. The market forecast, undertaken by analyst firm Mobilesquared, combines data from an Openmind consumer survey into push notification attitudes with industry messaging forecasts, to identify the additional revenue mobile network operators could capture if they act as the enablers for brands and organisations to send Push notifications to customers.

Revenue made simpleOperators can enable both SMS and Push notifications by providing a channel to users through standard self-care and service apps. The total $10.9bn opportunity is made up of two main elements:

First, a simple, inexpensive cloud-based push notification, content management and analytics engine could result in revenues of $2.2bn from Push notifications sent by operators this year alone, growing to $6.6bn by 2018. Second, enabling business models where operators can charge additional rates for high value “click through” messages might also yield additional revenue of $1.4bn, growing to $4.3bn by 2018 based on a rate of $0.1 per push notification.

Engagement explosionThis approach to Push notifications is a new, highly valuable and relevancy-driven model, which allows operators to command a higher per-message rate than the industry average. This is backed by research undertaken by On Device Research on behalf of Openmind, which shows 55% of consumers respond to Push notifications in some way, outstripping response rates of all other marketing channels. Meanwhile Mobilesquared forecasts that annual global push notification traffic is set to explode, growing from 22.9bn messages in 2015 to 581.5bn by 2018, with operator-enabled push notifications potentially growing to represent 11% of all global Push traffic by 2018.

Consumer push appetiteThe revenue forecast incorporates data from a survey of 3,000 smartphone users across the US, UK and Germany, conducted by On Device Research on behalf of Openmind. This survey demonstrates the powerful potential of Push notifications as a tool for user engagement for brands and organisations, even above other digital channels.

Top level findings include:

55% of those surveyed respond to Push notifications in some way, outstripping response rates of all other marketing channels e.g. SMS 10-20%, email 3.2%. 23% ranked Push notifications as their preferred mode of mobile communication for brands and organisations 21% of all of those who receive Push notifications respond to a notification to redeem an offer or make a purchase

“Many savvy brands are already using Push to connect with consumers – but medium and small companies and even larger national brands are being left behind due to the complexities of app development, and the significant costs of app marketing,” said Alex Duncan, CEO, Openmind Networks. “But operators can be the vital link in the value chain to enable significant upside for brands and organisations, and indeed for themselves. Operators already have many of the critical components to enable this service for their third party content providers – they have the infrastructure, the commercial relationships, and now they have the evidence that consumers want this type of engagement.”

Continued Duncan: “In a world of creaky legacy systems, this research and industry forecast highlight the Holy Grail of monetisation: with very little change to existing infrastructure and minimal investment, operators can quickly seize new revenue streams that will immediately yield real value to the tune of billions of dollars.”

"Consumers have never been hungrier for communications from their favourite businesses and brands, and operators’ trusted role makes them the ideal enablers of third-party communications to their subscriber base.” said Nick Lane, Chief Analyst, Mobilesquared. “SMS has always been the most potent of marketing forces, and there is no reason why push notifications cannot equal, or even, surpass this."

More information on the potential revenue models for operators, as well as the full survey results, are available for download here: http://www.openmindnetworks.com/white-papers/push-notifications/.